Phoebe Bridgers, Role Model, my friends… who is safe from my malignancy?

One of the many retired formats of this blog is “winners and losers of the week.” People liked it, I just don’t like weekly premises; sometimes, a week is barren. Months are safe, however, and safer yet are seasons: “Song of the Summer” is something I’d love to discuss (it was “Choosin’ Texas”). But, as I wrote a few days ago, the summer had no fun blockbusters (Odyssey review here—it was okay). I wasn’t traveling around the cape or Ischia, because I’m not married to a tech founder. All I have are ephemera—shrapnel—that don’t have their own home. I’ll make a home for them here. A home of love or loathing.

I’ll invent a title for Claire Stapleton right here right now: she’s the first famous subscriber to this newsletter. We don’t really have friends in common, to my knowledge, but she found me and commented on my writing and I appreciated it. She starts her pub day Substack post with “what’s up you guys…”—we have the same name and similar vibes. When we met in person for the first time it was so fun I wasn’t tired afterward.

A couple weeks ago, she published Don’t Be Evil, a memoir about being the “Bard of Google” then organizing the Google walkouts. When she announced this book I smiled softly and assumed it would be good because she’s a good writer. But then I read the book and found myself crying at the book.

I have many great friends but sometimes struggle to relate to them about “work.” The idea of having a career involving spreadsheets and accomplishments that often have nothing to do with the way you understand yourself, but taking pride in it, not hating it. Not knowing where work and self begin or end, but knowing they are totally separate. My friends are writers and that is their self and job, or they have non-creative jobs and those jobs are their lives. I don’t relate to either.

Most of my adult life has been dictated by the very strange and specific way people behave about work. People shorthand this on TikTok these days and say “corporate,” but I’ve worked in all kinds of situations and I’m really talking more about a historical attitude. With the Internet, a Millennial culture and the cross-generational people who rode it promised things would be different and nicer, but when those people aged into power they were actually crueler than the people they claimed to be rebelling against. There was more wealth to accrue and higher stakes, and they could also sheath their ruthlessness in niceness, and they did. I had a particularly traumatic experience within this milieu. It is scary and no one really talks about it.

The book made me feel a part of something bigger, a cultural shift against two-faced participation in capitalism. It’s also just so fascinating to hear real stories from inside the war, to know how crazy people can act in such public positions of so much power. Everyone is a clown from the circus.

You should really buy the book here.